


the silent language of grief

by deathrae



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: 'lex is this you externally processing grief' 'no why do you ask that', Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Oops, Start of Relationship, cuz she's so good, listen 13 has so much history behind her and I can't wait to see the show tackle it, spoilers through the end of episode 5, this was supposed to go with my other collection of fics that weren't shippy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-09
Updated: 2018-12-09
Packaged: 2019-09-14 12:18:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16912752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathrae/pseuds/deathrae
Summary: “What I’m sayin’ is, people are people,” the Doctor explains. She’s closer now, easing nearer step by step as she talks, and Yaz doesn’t think she’s realized she’s doing it. “People fear what they don’t understand. What’s new and strange and alien. Mostly that’s all religion is. A way to make sense of the chaos."After the Tsuranga Conundrum, Yaz and the Doctor discuss grief and mourning and how maybe the Doctor isn't as good at it as she thinks she is.





	the silent language of grief

**Author's Note:**

> (Title from a Voltaire quote.)

> _May the saints of all the stars and constellations bring you hope as they guide you out of the dark and into the light: on this voyage, and the next, and all the journeys still to come._
> 
> _For now and evermore._

Resus One is good about teleporting them back to Seffilun 27 without much fuss, but Yaz finds herself thinking about the ceremony on the evac ship for hours even after they return to the TARDIS. (She’s pretty sure the Doctor is holding back tears when they find the old blue box right where they left it, but all of them have the tact not to point it out.) She thinks about the words, about the rhythm of the prayer that was so like a song but just slightly different.

She thinks about the expression on the Doctor’s face while Ronan spoke. About the tiny hitch in her voice when she asked if they could join.

She thinks about how strange it is to actually notice the Doctor’s vulnerabilities, her insecurities. Once they get back to the ship, once the Doctor has gotten done rejoicing in the fact that they have not lost the TARDIS to scavengers and salvagers, she puts on her happy-go-lucky excited-puppy mask but she doesn’t get it on quite straight. Yaz sees, just barely, the cracks where an old, _old_ grief leaks through.

She’s not sure what to do about it. Or even if she _should_ do something about it.

She’s still not quite made up her mind hours later when Ryan and Graham retire to their borrowed bedrooms. Yaz lingers, not quite planned and not quite conscious of it, watching the Doctor. It’s like watching a wind-up toy lose its charge: when the Doctor thinks she’s alone, the mask slips a bit, then more, then entirely, and she lets herself ease down to idling like an old auto transmission trailing back to neutral. She never slows so much as to be at a human speed, no, the Doctor is never quite so calm or ordinary as humans, but she scales back all the same, until she is something almost unrecognizable to herself.

“Doctor?” Yaz says quietly.

The Doctor doesn’t jump, exactly, but it’s clear she thought Yaz had left the room, because she pivots away from the controls and scrambles to get her expression to something she deems appropriate.

But this time Yaz is watching, and she sees the lines of age around her eyes and mouth that are usually invisible. She sees the exhaustion, the world-weariness, the sorrow.

“Yaz! Brilliant, sorry, lost track there, thought you went off with Ryan and Graham. Everythin’ all right?”

“Yeah,” Yaz offers, even though it’s not strictly speaking true, because it hits her now, hard, how she shouldn’t be surprised that the Doctor carries so much on her shoulders. She carries the universe, the lives of three human companions in her ship, the memories of her family—the one she said on Graham’s front stoop that she’d lost—and who knew who else besides. She knows the Doctor is old, very old, _comically_ old, but she’s never asked for specifics. She doesn’t need them. She doesn’t need a number to know that the Doctor has lived tens, maybe hundreds of lifetimes: more than enough time to love and lose and _lose again_.

“You sure?” the Doctor says, because she always puts others first. That Yaz has also seen.

“I think so,” Yaz says, trying again. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”

The Doctor’s expression flickers just for a moment, and Yaz swears she saw the Doctor's throat work, swallowing hard. A hint of dread sparking behind her eyes, vanishing as fast as it came.

“Sure, yeah, questions. Always good, questions.”

“That... that prayer, I guess,” Yaz says. “The incant?”

“Incantation, yeah,” the Doctor says, and a little of the strength seeps out of her shoulders. She leans back against the console.

“What’s it for?”

The Doctor’s smile is fragile this time, and off-center. “Come now Yaz, don’t give me easy ones like that! What’s any prayer for?”

“Guidance,” Yaz says without thinking very hard about it. “Answers. But that incantation. It reminded me of the Janazah.”

“A memorial to the fallen,” the Doctor says, agreeing. “That’s a primal, heart-deep desire, y’know. Religion hasn’t got the market cornered on fear of what comes after, no matter what they want t’tell ya.” She pauses, considering the words maybe, then steps forward, gesturing. She does this often, those perfect, elegant hands dancing through the air, and Yaz always imagines that when she does this, when her fingers weave and arc like ribbons, that she’s charting nebulae and star systems, or tracing the shapes of those strange circular patterns that are hidden away in places around the TARDIS, patterns she says are words, concepts, whole paragraphs. “’Cept that isn’t quite what I mean. It’s not that religion has it wrong, y’see. It’s just that as the universe goes on, as _time_ , right, as time marches on, religions have to expand. Expand beyond what any one world could conceive of. Think of how many religions, how many _faiths_ your Earth has in 2018. Compound that by a thousand planets. No, no by a _million_ planets. Once you get out into space? Then it all gets _complicated_.”

Yaz nods, even though she only barely understands.

“What I’m sayin’ is, people are people,” the Doctor explains. She’s closer now, easing nearer step by step as she talks, and Yaz doesn’t think she’s realized she’s doing it. “People fear what they don’t understand. What’s new and strange and alien. Mostly that’s all religion is. A way to make sense of the chaos. But religions, historically speakin’ I mean, rarely keep pace with technology. That’s where all the troubles start, yeah. So what happens—mind you it takes some time, takes a long bloody time really—what happens is that when people start gettin’ into space, things _have_ to change, at least by degrees.”

“Sure,” Yaz says, not because the Doctor is waiting for confirmation that she’s listening, understanding, but because the Doctor is barely more than two feet away, her hands tracing patterns in the air like sparklers, and it feels like a response is due.

“Things get, well, they get universalized, if you get what I mean. They have to, for any one idea to survive.”

“What’s all that have to do with the incantation?”

“The incantation is by its nature neutral and accessible,” the Doctor says. “But it’s also speakin’ to ideas from all sorts of religions, see. Every religion, when you boil it down, is about two things, right. _Why is it all like this_ , and _what happens after_. No one faith has a monopoly on grievin’. You look like you have more questions though, am I not makin’ sense?”

“No,” Yaz says gently. “No, it makes sense. It’s just.” She hesitates and takes a deep breath, smelling fabric softener and fresh-tilled earth and something that reminds her of the musty, parchment-y smell of sheet music newly out of storage. The Doctor is standing so close Yaz would swear she can feel the warmth of her body, of her clothes.

“Just what?”

“It’s just I got the feeling that wasn’t the first time you’d said it,” Yaz says, as softly as she can.

They’re too close now for her to miss how the Doctor’s expression falters, the way her eyebrows pull together for a moment and then smooth out, the way the corner of her mouth twitches with an old and not-quite-forgotten pain, the way her eyes darken as if by the shadow of a cloud before the sun.

“No,” the Doctor admits, with the weight of a confession. “No, it isn’t.”

“Do you say it a lot?”

“When I remember,” the Doctor says, her voice dropping to something small and vulnerable and so unlike her that Yaz wants to take her hands and hold on tight. “I don’t always, but I try to.”

“For your family?” Yaz asks.

“Ah, no,” the Doctor says, her expression twisting again, but this time she doesn’t even try, really, to mask it. “I’ve lost... I’ve lost a lot of people.”

“That’s why you said _be sure_ , isn’t it,” Yaz says.

The Doctor nods, and Yaz realizes, almost as an afterthought, that the Doctor hasn’t looked up from where she’s been staring at Yaz’s third shirt button for almost two minutes.

“Can I hug you?” Yaz asks.

It has the desired response in jerking the Doctor out of her own head: she straightens suddenly to look at Yaz’s face, perhaps searching for intentions and plans and schemes in the soft slant of Yaz’s frown and the sadness in her eyes.

“Haven’t had a proper Yaz hug before,” she says. She’s trying for a tone of lightness and humor, Yaz can tell, but it doesn’t quite land. “I’m always game for new experiences.”

The Doctor has an inch or two on her but she wraps her arms over the Doctor’s shoulders, pulling her in so that the Doctor’s head rests against her collarbone. She can feel the line of the Doctor’s nose against her throat, can hear the faint jangle of her jewelry and the clicking of the fastenings on her coat. The Doctor is stiff for a moment. Despite her accepting the invitation, she’s clearly unused to this type of contact, or at least just unpracticed with even very ordinary physical intimacy in her new body and its new dimensions. But then she relaxes, and Yaz feels the moment when what they’re doing translates from comfort to _permission._ When the Doctor realizes what Yaz is really offering. Her whole body slumps forward against Yaz’s, and Yaz feels those narrow shoulders shaking under her arms, as with an effort not to cry.

Yaz finds her thoughts running in two parallel directions. One is mundane, and very physically oriented—the sensation of the Doctor’s breath puffing in sharp little bursts against Yaz’s skin, the warmth of her where she’s pressed against Yaz’s chest and shoulders and hips, the solidity of the rail against Yaz’s back that’s really the only thing keeping them both from falling right off the console platform. It occurs to her, with an almost giddiness, that this is the second time today the Doctor has been pressed against her, but this time they’re face to face, and it isn’t in a life-or-death situation with the Doctor using her only remaining shield—her own body—to protect Yaz from a tiny, lethal alien and an even tinier, even more lethal bomb.

If she’s being honest with herself, she relishes the contact, the pressure, the heat of the Doctor’s body against her own. She’s wanted this for days, weeks maybe, but hasn’t quite dared to put herself this close. Now she has it, if for a terrible, painful reason.

She lifts a hand to stroke her fingers through the Doctor’s hair, something her mum used to do when she was little that always made her feel better, and she feels the resultant conflict of emotions: the Doctor’s tension ratcheting up in surprise, then drifting to confusion, then to uncertainty, and only then releasing even further than before, going boneless and small against Yaz’s chest.

But Yaz’s other train of thought is based more on emotions and it’s hard to stomach. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen the Doctor look anything less than superhumanly strong before today. Sure there’ve been rough patches—the look on the Doctor’s face when they had to stay in their seats on the bus in Montgomery is a sight she won’t soon forget—but even in that moment, there was a sense Yaz had, an intuition maybe, that these were the kinds of hard moments that defined the Doctor rather than tearing her apart.

But now, here, in her mind’s eye, Yaz keeps seeing the twisted expression of agony on the Doctor’s face as her organs spasmed, sometimes so bad it knocked her off her feet. The sharp grief and horror as she realized they were four days of space flight away from her—their—home. And that thought branches to another: she saw the Doctor in pain several times the night they first met, when she kept talking about her body rebooting, the “fizzing” inside her, but Yaz has to admit, now, so much later, that she didn’t really take it seriously at the time. It seemed like some elaborate prank, or at the very least it was just... maybe what the Doctor was like. A baseline. And anyway none of it made any sense.

But now she knows better. Now she knows that the Doctor is brilliant, and strong, and likes to pretend she’s invulnerable. But she isn’t.

She can be hurt. She can even be killed, sort of. And maybe it’s not really possible to die of grief, but Yaz suspects that if anyone could, it would be this brilliant, beautiful, impossible alien with two hearts.

“Somethin’ funny ‘bout religions,” Yaz says after a while of near-silence, holding the Doctor while the console room hummed with the soft background noise of the ship’s heart. The fact that the Doctor allows it to go on this long gives wings to the fledgling little hope for something more that lives in her chest. Maybe later its flight will be devastating, but here, now, she lets herself dream. “The ones with funeral prayers, in particular, I mean.”

“Yeah?” the Doctor says, her voice muffled by Yaz’s shirt.

“They’ve got all these rules, y’know. ‘Bout how you’re supposed to handle the body, and how fast. What you’re supposed to pray, and when, and how.”

“Never was much of an expert on religious law,” the Doctor admits with a soft, wry chuckle. “My focus was more on people. Don’t quite like how religions like to dictate the hows. Always thought that should be more of a personal thing.”

“Well that’s just it,” Yaz says, and she rests her cheek on top of the Doctor’s head, her fingers still carding idly through the Doctor’s hair. “The how is usually pretty simple. You gotta mean it, right, like you gotta really feel it when you’re prayin’.”

She scoffs. “Well that part’s easy. How’s that a rule then?”

“ _And_ ,” Yaz says firmly, cutting the Doctor off before she can tangent herself into a less uncomfortable topic, “You don’t do it alone.”

The Doctor goes quiet then, and she doesn’t lift her head from Yaz’s shoulder, but Yaz feels the shuddering exhale that comes next. She feels, more so than she hears, a soft, inquisitive sound that’s not quite language, and not quite music. It vibrates through the Doctor’s chest into her own and threatens to break her solitary heart.

“If you want,” Yaz says, and only here, only now, does her voice really falter, cracking in the middle, “I could say it with you sometimes. When it gets heaviest, like. Whatever you want.”

“I tried to forget once,” the Doctor says, and it almost sounds like a non sequitur but it isn’t, Yaz _feels_ that it isn’t deep in her chest. “Tried to forget it all. All their faces. The looks in their eyes when they realized I’d failed them.”

Yaz inhales, sharp and hard and it feels like she takes in part of the Doctor’s pain with it, a transference of oxygen and carbon dioxide and self-loathing.

“Shouldn’t be tellin’ ya this,” the Doctor says, but there’s no conviction in it. “You’re so young yet. No frame of reference. I’ll spook y’besides, scare you off to where you’re askin’ me to go home.”

“You’re right,” Yaz says, even though there’s several other things on her tongue, all of them protests—like _you can’t know what it is that I know_ and _don’t speak to me like I don’t understand_ and _don’t you treat me like a kid too_ —but she doesn’t say any of those things. She lets her hand stray down until it’s resting on the back of the Doctor’s neck, just below her hair and just above the hood of her coat. The Doctor lets out a breath, sudden and fitful, but doesn’t object to the touch. Yaz leaves her fingers where they are. “I don’t have perspective, and I _am_ young, and it _is_ scary. But I’m here. And you can’t do everythin’ alone. So tell me anyway.”

She almost expects the Doctor to argue it further. To pull away, disentangle herself, wrap the energy of a star back around herself like a cape and burn away the attachments she has to mortal things, and pretend this never happened.

But she doesn’t.

Against all odds, she stays.

“Sometimes y’remind me of Rose,” she says instead.

“Tell me ‘bout her?” Yaz suggests. “Even if she’s one of the ones you think you failed?”

“Almost did right by her,” the Doctor says, half under her breath. “Almost.”

Yaz hears her own voice shake. “Did she die?”

“No,” the Doctor says, sounding thoughtful. If Yaz didn’t know better she’d have said the Doctor found the idea surprising. “Expect she’s still alive, actually.”

“Where is she?”

“In a parallel universe,” the Doctor says, so seriously that Yaz doesn’t doubt for even a second that it’s the absolute truth. “With a sort of. Copy of me, I guess. Or, me as I was. That was a few lifetimes ago. Oh! Was I skinny back then!” she adds.

Only now, finally, does she raise her head. She’s laughing softly, partially at herself but partially just in general, and it hits Yaz like a wrecker that she’s never seen the Doctor look so beautiful as just then, wreathed in remembrance and standing on that fine line just between sorrow and joy. She doesn’t pull away entirely, though, just sets her feet a little different so that Yaz isn’t completely supporting her weight. It feels, incomprehensibly, like she doesn’t want to leave the protective circle of Yaz’s arms, and that makes Yaz happy. But staying so close means their bodies are pressed tight together, and Yaz is hyper-conscious of the pressure of the Doctor’s belly and hips against her own.

“Taller then, too,” the Doctor adds, her face all crinkled up with a smile. “Proper beanpole, me.”

“What happened, though?” Yaz asks, before she can get distracted, swept away by the tide that is the Doctor’s thoughts. “When you tried to forget them all?”

The Doctor’s good humor falters, flickers, fades, settles into something that is still, mostly at least, a smile, but sad and as delicate as porcelain. “Didn’t go well,” she says. “Started to forget what was important. Lost sight of some things.”

“How’d you not get lost to it?”

“I did for a while,” she admits. “Spent a few hundred years mostly by myself.”

“That sounds lonely,” Yaz whispers.

“It was. Wasn’t good for me,” she says. “I checked in with some friends on Earth here and there. Thought it would be enough.”

“But it wasn’t.”

“Nah,” she says with false brightness, an attempt at levity the topic doesn’t quite deserve. She sobers. “Finally let them come along again after that. Needed them to help me remember.”

Yaz senses where the thought is going and almost loses the nerve to ask.

“Where are they now?”

“Cemetery in Manhattan,” the Doctor says, and her mouth twists, her eyes misting over until Yaz wipes tears away with her thumb.

“Doctor,” Yaz says, her heart and voice together breaking on the two syllables that have utterly transformed her life.

“So many names,” she says, and her eyes are unfocused, looking just past Yaz’s face without seeing her. “So many good people.”

“There’ll be more,” Yaz says, and it doesn’t quite make sense even as she says it but she goes on anyway. “And you’ll lose more too, but that’s life, in’it? We have the beautiful things _because_ they’ll go away.”

The Doctor nods, but doesn’t say anything until Yaz huffs out a laugh through her nose, and then the Doctor frowns without actually looking at her. “What? Somethin’ funny?”

“Isn’t funny exactly. It’s just another thing about mournin’ in religions,” Yaz says, and waits until the Doctor’s eyes track to her face again. “There’s a time for it, months, even a year for some people and some faiths, but eventually, y’have to stop. The rules grant an expectation that y’move on an’ not just get stuck in that loop forever. You grieved these people, an’ that’s right and good, but you’re also allowed to move on. You carry them with you, like you said back in Sheffield, but you can’t let them tether you in one spot.”

The Doctor laughs at that, but the sound is more caustic this time, more dismissive. “Come on now Yaz, you know that’s not my problem. I’m a traveler, I don’t get tethered down anywhere.”

“Not physically, no,” Yaz agrees. “Not temporally, neither. But emotionally. You’re still there, aren’t you? You left a piece of yourself in that parallel world. A piece in New York. And dozens of others, yeah? Little pieces of you scattered across the universe with all the people you’ve ever lost.”

The Doctor isn’t laughing anymore, and there’s a flicker of... almost fear, maybe. Yaz shifts her grip on the Doctor so that she’s holding to the sleeves of the Doctor’s coat, giving her space but also not letting her run away this time.

“You put on that face and tell us you’re all right but you’re not, and that’s not right. Remember them, but don’t keep on mournin’ them, Doctor, or you’ll tear yourself into so many pieces that all that’s left’ll be the mask.”

Afterward Yaz will be hard pressed to say how it happened, exactly. She’s just aware that one moment she’s trying to make a point, she’s pleading that the Doctor take her seriously without ever using exactly those words, begging her to not just listen but to _hear_. And the next moment there’s a soft, impossible mouth on hers, and a gentle, desperate pressure of a kiss that has very little to do with lust and all the world to do with being seen and understood when no one else can or would.

She hesitates just a little too long, and the Doctor pulls away, her eyes down, her hair falling across her face to shadow her eyes.

“Sorry,” she says immediately, hoarse and a little too quiet. She starts to pull back, her bootheel clicking on the platform. “Sorry, just. I dunno, that just— I shouldn’ve done that. Not without askin’, not without warnin’, just y’caught me off-guard an’— you’d think with a brain like mine I’d ‘ave the good sense not to—”

“No,” Yaz says, and curls her fingers around the Doctor’s braces, keeping her from moving any further with only the most minimal of pressure. “You surprised me, that’s all. Were you tryin’ to distract me? Shut me up?”

“No!” the Doctor insists, instantly. “No, not tryin’ to distract you, what you said was so good, and right, and wise, an’ I just—”

“Then it’s all right,” Yaz says, and the Doctor pauses, blinking owlishly at her.

“Is it?”

“Yeah,” Yaz says, a little before her brain can catch up with her words, but she finds that not only does she mean it, it _is_ what she wants. “It’s all right. We  _will_ finish that conversation later though, yeah? Cuz I admit, I think _this_ change in topic I’m interested in.”

The Doctor grins, slowly, shyly almost, and lets Yaz pull her in another step by her straps. “Well I s’pose that’s all right then.”

“Good,” Yaz says, and tilts her head up just a little to meet the Doctor’s as she leans against the rail again.

This time, when the Doctor presses against her, it’s for a third and very, _very_ different reason, but she can’t find it in her to complain.


End file.
